Recursive make harmful

[Tom Tromey]

I think right now automake should have enough machinery that you could
write a single Makefile.am for an entire project.  This ought to have
some performance benefits for the build.  Has anybody tried this in a
serious way?  I'm curious to hear about experiences.


Last night I gave some thought to whether we could support this
directly in automake.  The idea would be to read all the Makefile.am
at once and then generate a single large Makefile.in.

Unfortunately I think this is very hard.  We could probably do it if
we could add additional constraints on the Makefile.am writer.
Unfortunately these constraints might be enough of a pain that it
would be easier to just write a single Makefile.am in the first place.

Tom